infoTECH Feature

HP's New Moonshot Servers Will Use Less Power, Less Space

Hewlett-Packard (News - Alert) has presented its new Moonshot servers which need lower power to operate, take up less space in data centers, and run at a lower cost.

They will use 89 percent less power than other servers from HP, the company reports, and take up 80 percent less space. Costs will be lowered by over 77 percent.

In fact, Moonshot servers take up one eighth of the space used by more traditional servers. The chassis shares components, such as fabric, HP Integrated Lights-Out (iLo) management, power supply and cooling fans.

The design also leads to lower energy use.

The new servers come as there is more demand for servers from the increasing use of mobile devices.

"With nearly 10 billion devices connected to the internet and predictions for exponential growth, we've reached a point where the space, power and cost demands of traditional technology are no longer sustainable," Whitman added in a company statement carried by TMCnet. "HP Moonshot marks the beginning of a new style of IT that will change the infrastructure economics and lay the foundation for the next 20 billion devices."

The technology used in the new servers has been tested by the company for about a year.

Also, the new servers are seen by Dow Jones as part of Whitman’s efforts to concentrate on computers, printers and servers, and still invest in research and development.

The servers will start out as operated by Intel (News - Alert) Corp.'s Atom chips, now used in tablets, smartphones and netbooks. Later, they’ll move to chips from ARM Holdings PLC. Future suppliers include Applied Micro Circuits Corp., Calxeda and Texas Instruments (News - Alert). They may also use graphics chips and other programmable chips.

Users can select hardware and software that is best suited for tasks by a method called "software-defined" servers. It improves innovation and makes innovations happen “three times faster," the company told Dow Jones.

"Faced with constraints for energy efficiency and analytic compute capacity to support world-leading geosciences research, we absolutely require technological innovations from leading companies like HP," said Chris Hill, an engineer at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-chair of the Research and Education Subcommittee, Massachusetts Green High Performance Computing. "Innovations such as HP Moonshot are providing us with confidence that infrastructure can continue to scale out to support fundamentally insatiable requirements – all with less energy, a smaller footprint, increased integration and lower cost.”

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